A new Alvvays album is the music equivalent of a Sally Rooney novel: devastating plainspoken lines, youthful yet universal, feminine but not girly, full of longing and bared teeth and hope and sly humor. On the Canadian band's third, Blue Rev, it's there in the power pop swirl (never a churn) of "Pharmacist," as sunny as something by that depressive genius Brian Wilson, and in the clever lines of "Easy on Your Own?" (which sounds like the Sundays with turbo power): "I dropped out of college/ Education's a dull knife/ If you don't believe/ In the lettered life," Molly Rankin sings. "Pretty quiet out here/ It's abundantly clear/ That no one's been coming for me/ No encouraging sounds/ Helicopters or hounds," goes the ballad-to-accelerator "Lottery Noises." Rankin's poetry can be breathless, and on the '80s jangle pop of "After the Earthquake," her voice is like a kite on a blindingly bright but windy day. "Woke up in the rain/ Woke up in a sweat/ Now you're living in a condo/ And you wanna forget," she chases herself on "Pomeranian Spinster"—an excellent, should-be-a-hit rush of adrenaline that wouldn't be out of place on a Kiwi Jr. album. "Very Online Guy," meanwhile, brings to mind the Concretes: sexy yet naif, with excellent organ from Kerri MacLellan and Rankin calling out obnoxious internet mansplaining: "He's a very online guy/ He likes to hit reply." There are references to Murder She Wrote, Television singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine and Belinda Carlisle ("Belinda says that heaven is a place on earth/ Well, so is hell," Rankin declares on "Belinda Says"). It makes sense that the band likes to cover the late, great Kirsty MacColl and Camera Obscura, and that Rankin has referenced early Teenage Fanclub and the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt as influences. "Pressed" borrows the jangling eddy of early R.E.M., and "Velveteen" sounds like soft-nap fabric rubbed the "wrong" way—before the song takes off for the stratosphere near the end. These are delightfully brief little glints of light: No track is over three-and-a-half minutes, nor do they need to be. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz